£15m to be spent on tackling council housing failures in Brighton and Hove
Thousands of flats have been left without repairs or safety checks
Housing chiefs said that they were investing more than £15 million to tackle serious failings in hundreds of council homes.
The spending is part of a series of steps due to be outlined to Brighton and Hove City Council’s Labour cabinet at a meeting in the coming week.
A report to the cabinet spells out a series of actions under way and planned after the Regulator of Social Housing published a critical report last month.
The regulator said that the council “is failing to ensure that it meets a number of legal requirements in relation to health and safety”.
There were shortcomings in
electrical safety
provision of smoke detectors
water safety
fire safety
The regulator said that 3,600 council homes out of about 12,100 did not have an electrical condition report.
And more than 600 homes required a water risk assessment while 500 were at least three months overdue for water safety repairs and improvements.
The “significant backlog” of 8,000 low-risk and low-priority repairs was also highlighted.
In response, the council said that it had set up a Corporate Housing Building Safety Programme and was tracking all “compliance actions” to manage risks effectively.
The report to the cabinet said: “We have adopted a risk-based approach to inspections and following remedial actions, prioritising properties based on the severity of identified risks.
“This strategy ensures that high-risk issues are addressed first while also providing a clear timeline for completing lower-risk actions.
“This approach is designed to give confidence that we are managing our compliance obligations in a structured and effective manner.
“Our monitoring framework includes regular updates to the Regulator of Social Housing.
“With regard to compliance with the wider building safety and fire safety requirements, we are also engaging with other regulatory bodies we are accountable to, including East Sussex Fire and Rescue Authority and the Health and Safety Executive / Building Safety Regulator.”
The council has completed fire risk assessments for all 68 high-risk buildings and for 569 non-high-risk buildings.
A detailed action plan has been drawn up for each of the council’s 46 high-rise blocks of flats while more work is needed on fire risk assessments for lower-risk buildings.
A programme to fir all council homes with a hard-wired smoke detection system by December 2026 had reached 83.6 per cent of homes up to July.
An electrical testing and compliance team aims to retest all domestic and communal properties by December 2026 and to maintain a five-year testing cycle.
So far 56 per cent of the 12,013 council housing properties have a valid electrical installation report completed within the past five years and 73.7 per cent within the past ten years.
The number of outstanding routine repairs which have not been completed within 28 days has fallen from 9,653 in June to 7,250 in July. And the long-term repairs backlog fell from 6,476 in June to 5,309 in July.
Since April, of the 2,829 new repair jobs logged, 77 per cent were completed within 28 days.
The cabinet is due to discuss the situation at Hove Town Hall on Thursday (26 September). The meeting is scheduled to start at 2pm and to be webcast on the council’s website.